The Man Who Put the K in Kops

Mack Sennett (1880-1960) is famous for discovering Charlie Chaplin, creating the Keystone Kops, coining the term “bathing beauty” and being, as his front-page obituary in The New York Times called him, “the film pioneer whose name was synonymous with slapstick comedy.” All true, but as demonstrated by the 50 mainly short films digitally restored and gathered in a three-disc Blu-ray set, “The Mack Sennett Collection Volume One” (Flicker Alley), he was something more.

Sennett defined (or redefined) American humor. There is scarcely a physical clown or verbal wiseguy whose antics or attitude Sennett did not anticipate. Writing in “Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies,” the cultural historian Robert Sklar cited Sennett’s “inventive, resourceful vulgarity,” crediting his primitive two-reel comedies with “cutting a wider swath through society and its values than any previous expression of the comic tradition in America, with the single exception of that 19th-century masterpiece of comic prose, ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’ ”

Born to a working-class family in rural Quebec, Sennett was an indifferent student and aspiring Irish basso who found work as a burlesque comic, breaking into movies at Biograph, the studio on 14th Street in Manhattan that employed D. W. Griffith. Sennett wrote treatments — including one for the mother of all suspense dramas, “The Lonely Villa,” filmed by Griffith in 1909 — and performed before moving on to directing. Cognizant of Griffith’s technical innovations, he turned melodramas into comedies, exaggerating the master’s rat-a-tat montage while under-cranking the camera to further accelerate the action.

Griffith was a sentimentalist who saw himself as a chivalrous social reformer. Sennett was a cynic who would do almost anything for a laugh. The earliest item in the Sennett Collection, a 1909 one-reeler, “The Curtain Pole,” directed by Griffith from a Sennett script is unlike any Griffith film I know — a rowdy, one-joke comedy in which a foppish fool wreaks havoc in his attempt to replace a broken curtain rod. The barking dog, a swerving horse-drawn carriage and gawking extras suggest a set even wilder than the movie in which the outsize curtain pole brains everyone in range.

In 1912, Sennett left Biograph to found his own studio, Keystone, exclusively devoted to two-reel comedies and a particular vision of the modern world populated by inane go-getters, young women in daring swimsuits and ridiculous policemen who were less guardians of order than ineffectual enforcers of Victorian blue laws. Propelled by ticking bombs, misbehaving Murphy beds and disastrous joy rides in speeding tin lizzies, the movies have a heedless, ballistic quality. That Keystone was known as the “fun factory” is a suggestive oxymoron — the robotic quality of Sennett’s characters is the slapstick equivalent of such contemporary developments as Frederick W. Taylor’s science of efficient movement and Henry Ford’s assembly line.

Some, like the critic Walter Kerr, have complained that Sennett’s films were not actually all that funny. But “funny” is an anemic term to describe farces that invite you to laugh at grief, pain, cruelty, stupidity, dismemberment and death. Sennett’s films can be shockingly callous, steeped in sick humor and gross-out comedy. “The Noise of Bombs” (1914) keeps a baby in continuous danger and has as its final gag the villain blown sky high. Foiled in his attempt to secure a free turkey, the scurrilous antihero of “A Bird’s a Bird” (1915) decides to kill a pet parrot; later in the movie, a dinner guest’s copious chin whiskers can be seen floating in the gravy boat.

Mr. Sklar argues that Sennett’s comedies “gave audiences their first glimpses of a social perspective that was to become one of the most emotionally powerful of Hollywood formulas: the anarchic individual pitted against disordered violent authority.” Sennett, however, was an equal-opportunity offender; with the exception of fun-loving girls like Mabel Normand, the movies have no admirable characters. The typical Sennett character is some combination of witless, lazy, lustful, duplicitous and cowardly. Husbands are feckless; wives are shrews.

Sennett joined with Griffith and the director the Thomas H. Ince in 1915 to form the short-lived powerhouse Triangle Film Corporation. His comedies grew longer and more ambitious. “Fatty and Mabel Adrift” (1916), directed by Roscoe Arbuckle (known as Fatty), is a rambunctious romantic triangle that climaxes with a honeymoon cottage floating out to sea. “Teddy at the Throttle” (1917) is a rapid-fire exercise in lechery, avarice and general nastiness that features the villain (Wallace Beery) chaining the heroine (Gloria Swanson) to a railroad track, where she is saved not by her faithless boyfriend (the diminutive Bobby Vernon) but by Teddy the Wonder Dog. The impressively immoderate “Her Torpedoed Love” (1917) makes shameless use of German U-boats as a comic plot device.

Although frenzied dancing and uninhibited carousing herald the approach of the Roaring Twenties, the comedies that Sennett actually produced during that decade are markedly less anarchic. Still, he continued to violate notions of good taste — as with “Broke in China” (1927), a shaggy-dog story in which a befuddled sailor (Ben Turpin) discovers that the berouged floozy attempting to pick him up in a Shanghai dive is his long-lost mother — and his eye for talent was a constant. The fabulously infantile Harry Langdon made his first movies for Sennett, as did that beautiful madcap Carole Lombard, swaggering through the college comedy “Run, Girl, Run” (1928).

Sennett made the transition to sound before retiring. The final items on the Sennett Collection include two W. C. Fields shorts, “The Dentist” (1932) and “The Fatal Glass of Beer” (1933), both based on sketches Fields first performed on Broadway in the 1928 edition of Earl Carroll’s Vanities, a pair of superbly misanthropic character-driven farces that show Sennett had scarcely lost his appreciation for brutal American humor.

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